Botball tourney runs on frustration, adrenaline

Students spend Saturday coaxing their robots through competition.

If there had been a prize for the best fashion statement at the 2008 Florida Regional Botball Tournament, the girls' team from Jacksonville's Robert E. Lee High School easily would have won.

Sophomores D'Andrea Haynes, 16, and Caddi Locke, 15, were pretty in pink. Pink was the color of a T-shirt emblazoned on the front with "Rocbot gurlz" - rocbot being a contraction of "rock star" and "robot" -and on the back with "We Kick Bot!"

Unfortunately, while their T-shirts kicked bot, their robots didn't.

After one particularly disappointing round in which the wheels came off, literally, they were asked what went wrong.

"What didn't go wrong?" Locke said. "That would be easier to answer."

Like most of the high school and middle school students competing Saturday on 17 teams representing 12 Northeast Florida schools, the "Rocbot gurlz" were finding the day would be filled with highs and lows.

Landrum had just survived a match against an Episcopal High School team in which it seemed to lose decisively. But the Episcopal robot wouldn't stop when it was supposed to stop, so the Episcopal team was disqualified.

The annual botball competition has been held regionally in Jacksonville for two decades, said Charles Winton, a University of North Florida professor of computer and information sciences who is chief judge and organizer of the competition.

During the past six weeks, teams have been planning strategy and building the robots that would execute that strategy. Most of the robots were about the size of small household appliances.

Winton said this year's scenario was that a solar flare had occurred and teams had two minutes to clear a planet's surface of debris, represented by plastic cups and tiny paper umbrellas, and herd their crews of fuzzy colored balls into holding areas. Bonus points were available for completing such tasks as lowering and crossing a bridge onto the competing team's planet surface.

Each team had two robot controllers.

The morning was spent playing a series of "seeding" games. A double elimination tournament started in the early afternoon.

After the seeding round, the top three teams were from Ed White High School, which finished second, and Nease High School, which had teams ranked first and third.

Matthew Thompson, 16, the leader of one of the Nease teams, said he was particularly relishing the idea of an intra-school showdown.

"We're neck-and-neck at this point," he said. "It will be interesting."

Leaders of the other Nease team were sophomores Jeffrey Hsu and Quintin Carlson.

Hsu said he loves the strategic planning that goes into preparing for the tournament as much as he loves the actual tournament play. But Carlson obviously was on an adrenaline rush following several strong performances.

"It's always exhilarating to be out there," he said.

In the end, the Nease team headed by Thompson was named the overall winner, while the other Nease team fell to sixth. Fletcher High School took second, and Ed White third.

The competition is organized by the KISS Institute of Practical Robotics in Norman, Okla., which will hold an international botball competition this summer in Oklahoma. All of the teams that competed Saturday at UNF are eligible to attend. But Thompson's Nease team, chosen overall winner Saturday, will get a travel stipend to help defer the costs of going, a KISS spokeswoman said.